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Thursday, May 3, 2012

Four large manufacturers of processed beverages—The Coca
Cola Company, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Pepsico and SunnyD—have joined
forces to fight a common enemy: those small-minded people who worry that
Americans are taking in way too many calories through the consumption of the
sugar- and chemical-loaded concoctions.

Their weapons of choice are the typical rhetorical devices
of advertisers around the world: false comparisons and misleading statements.

These four and the American Beverage Association have been
sponsoring full-page print ads that tout how healthy and low calorie many of their
products are compared to a few years ago, meaning that collectively, they’re
selling fewer calories per container

The headline expresses the theme line of the campaign: AMERICA’S BEVERAGE COMPANIES ARE DELIVERING.
Embedded in the text, each line of which is separated from the next by very
wide ledding, are the three things that the beverage companies are delivering,
in green caps so they stand out:MORE CHOICES… SMALLER PORTIONS…FEWER
CALORIES…

The copy brings to life this assertion by describing actions
that the sodapop-mongers have recently taken to make portions smaller and
provide lower calorie beverages.

At the bottom are three white delivery men and a black
delivery woman, each standing behind a hand truck loaded with beverage products
of one of the four sponsoring companies. Pepsico, by the way, has the black
woman deliverer. Below that, in the same order as the deliverers, are the four
company logos.

As usual with attempts to
manipulate the public, the print ad’s call to action is to visit a website: DeliveringChoices.org,
where you see the same image of deliverers united below the following legend:“America's
Beverage Companies Are Delivering For You, Your Family And Community. We're
making it easier for people to choose a beverage that's right for them with
more choices, smaller portions, fewer calories and clear calorie labels.”
Actually, I saw the ad in the New York
Times and it told me to go to DeliveringChoicesNY.org, but it’s the
same website as DeliveringChoices.org.

The website gives more details on
how those who deliver soft drinks are helping to reduce obesity by offering
beverage products with fewer calories and in smaller portions.

The obvious rhetorical problem is
the use of the comparative: smaller, fewer.They don’t say small. They don’t say few. And with good reason.Soft drinks are for the most part empty
calories, except those that don’t have calories, but instead provide chemicals,
about which we know little except that they probably create the craving to eat
more calories.In other words, no soft
drink is good for you. Smaller is still bad, and so is fewer.

I’m not excited about the choices
that the beverage behemoths are offering to children—fruit and vegetable juice—either!
The fruit and vegetable drinks are spiked with sugar, while the real juices,
healthier than the other fare offered in vending machines to be sure, are not
as healthy as eating a piece of fruit or a vegetable. There’s that
comparative—healthier—again! They’re also selling water, but I understand that
most tap water is pretty healthy for you, and the money saved from buying the
bottled water could buy a real piece of fruit.

Subtler even than the use of the
comparative to make soft drinks seem healthy is the ad’s focus on “more
choice.”

On the narrative level, the pop
purveyors want us to thank them for adding smaller sizes, diet versions and
juice drinks to their mix of offerings.Below the surface, however, lies a message we have seen before from
people wanting to foist shoddy goods on the American public: People should have
the choice to smoke in public or not.People should have the choice of buying unhealthy foods.People should be able to have an unlimited
choice in doctors even if, by limiting that choice a little bit, we can cut
healthcare costs by 10% or more.People
should have the choice of charter schools, even if they have been proven in
many studies to do a worse job of educating children than the public schools
they replace. Employers should be able
to choose if they can impose their narrow views on birth control on their
employees.

Of course, more choice applies to
television stations available in a cable or satellite TV package, beers on the
menu and types of phones sold at your neighborhood electronics store.

Through the steady drum beat over
decades of advertising that touts the benefit of more choice, we have come to
think of more choice as a benefit in and of itself. When the beverage barons
tell us they are offering more choice, they are depending on this association
to rub off on the other messages.In its
barest form, the thought process I think they want to engender goes like this: More choice is good. Healthier beverages are
good. More choice therefore makes for healthier beverages. It’s a false syllogism, but the world of
propaganda is filled with such creatures.

Let’s take the more choice
principle one step further. Every single time we eat a meal or snack, we
exercise choice.We are told and have
come to believe that exercising choice is good. Therefore we have done
something good whatever choice we make, even if the choice is to have a 12-ounce
can of Coke or Pepsi for breakfast, with or without the side of toaster
tart.It is this thought process that
the beverage companies want you to have. They want you to feel good about
eating their crap. If you have that can of pop and feel guilty about it enough
times, pretty soon you’ll stop.

Unless, that is, you like to feel
guilty, in which case we have a lot of products for you to buy.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

You
would guess that most senior citizens and those approaching retirement will
have heard of Wisconsin Republican Congressional Representative Paul Ryan.
After all, he is the architect of the budget that proposes to radically gut
Medicare and Social Security.

And
wouldn’t you think that most single mothers would have heard of Ryan, who after
all has been an architect or loud supporter of every recent proposal to cut
food stamps and medical aid to children.

And
employees who currently get tax-free health care benefits from their employer—surely
most of them have heard of Ryan, who has advocated ending that tax exemption on
income and benefits.

And
I imagine that among those 98% of Catholic women who defy the Catholic Church
and use artificial birth control, there are still many who listened when the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that Ryan’s budget plans would
disproportionately cut programs that serve the poor and vulnerable.

I’m
guessing that the majority of people in the United States should have a reason
to dislike Ryan, who currently serves as leading spokesperson for the
right-wing’s low-tax, no-government social philosophy.

That’s
why I am so completely floored by the results of yesterday’s poll by Yahoo! on
its home page asking if Paul Ryan will boost or hurt Mitt Romney’s chances of
unseating President Obama.

As
of 3:30 pm yesterday afternoon, more than 100,000 had voted. Here’s what they
said:

Yes,
he'll boost Romney's chances: 24%

No,
he'll hurt Romney's chances: 22%

I
don't know who he is: 53%

That’s right, a majority of the people who voted in the
survey had never heard of Paul Ryan. The news is depressing, even if we assume
that people who respond to Yahoo! home page surveys are dramatically different
in their reading of the news from the general electorate. But I’m guessing that
people reading the Yahoo! home page get more news than the average person,
because Yahoo! puts news on its home page. In fact, it has plastered photos of
Ryan on its rotating box and put his name in many news headlines over the past
two years.

And yet, more people have never heard of him than have
formed an opinion about him, negative or positive.

And therein lies the biggest problem facing American
society: the complete ignorance and apathy of a large number of voters and
potential voters.

We can complain about the way that real news gets drowned
out by non-news such as celebrity news and gossip, political bloopers, features
about stuff and services to buy, sports and reductions of issues to personality
spats. After all, a Google search reveals only 3.7 million hits for “Paul Ryan
budget” and 400 million hits for Lady Gaga, who is only one of many celebrities
fueling celebrity mania. Or take Delmon Young, a semi-decent baseball player
who got crocked and issued some anti-Semitic slurs, thereby producing 5.7 million
hits in a Google search.

But we can’t just blame the news media. There are still many
stories about Ryan and most of them make the top of the news. We have only to
blame ourselves for becoming so distracted by earning bread and watching
circuses that we don’t even realize how much into the muck of ignorance we have
slipped.

Both President Obama and the Republicans are playing
misdirection games on the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, using pseudo-issues
to keep our minds off what should be our central concerns as we contemplate the
capture and then illegal assassination of the symbol of anti-American
terrorism.

The Republican’s misdirection involves torture.Once again, Republican torchbearers are making the incredibly inaccurate statement that enhanced interrogation
techniques—their polite word for torture—produced information that led to
identifying bin Laden’s location in Pakistan. In this case, the former
director of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., revived the
lie in a new memoir, Hard Measures,
and with an appearance Sunday night on the CBS’ “60 Minutes.”Once
again, those in the know like Senators Dianne
Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence,
and Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, are
correcting the lie by reminding us that all information leading to the
identification of bin Laden’s location came from traditional, legal and
non-painful interrogation.

But what
do the Republicans care if they are called on the lie? They still will have
moved the country away from asking and answering the questions, “Is torture
legal?” and “Is torture right?” Instead, we are focused on the question of efficacy:
“Does torture work?” Asking if it works implies that its use is accepted, at
least conditionally.

The
torture misdirection helps the Democrats as much as it helps the Republicans.
The Obama Administration doesn’t mind if we pose the torture question in a way
that appears to give proponents at least a chance of winning, as long as we’re
talking about torture. That way we won’t be talking about the continued
existence of Guantanamo and its dozens of prisoners mired in a legal no-man’s
land. That way we won’t talk about assassinating U.S. citizens without the
benefit of due process. That way we won’t talk about increased raiding of state-legal
medical marijuana operations or signing the bill to reauthorize the indefinite detention in
military custody of US citizens. I could drone on about civil rights abuses by
the centrist Obama Administration….Speaking of drones…

We should not be
talking about torture at all, except to pronounce prison sentences on Bush II,
Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Addington and the other architects of the illegal American
torture gulag. We should have moved on to a wholesale reevaluation of the
increased security measures we implemented after the 9/11 attack that have led
to a reduction in civil rights of our citizens and others.

But then again, we
should not be talking about the legality of abortion almost 40 years after Roe
v. Wade.

And we shouldn’t
still be debating the merits of offering birth control to women as part of
healthcare insurance.

And it’s truly
amazing that we’re still talking about soldiers in Afghanistan.

And how could we
possibly still be debating poll taxes, which in my mind is anything for which
you have to pay to be able to exercise your right to vote.

So maybe it
shouldn’t be so surprising to me that someone in the world is still defending
the use of torture. The persistence of false ideas takes our attention away
from what must be done: for example, to reinstate tradition civil rights for
everyone; educate our children in understanding and using the scientific
method; and reduce human generation of carbon-based emissions.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.